Disclaimer: i do not own Twilight - i do own the Arena and a wonderful pecan muffin. yum!
chapter five
"Evil is whatever distracts."
Franz Kafka
Edward
The Fates, in general, are a group of elderly immortal women who thrive off of passing along vague and often contradictory prophecies. It's to my understanding that they enjoy confusing the Gods - look at any of the Ancients. They were given small clusters of information and expected to piece it together, sometimes guessing correctly, other times being completely off the mark.
I wasn't supposed to be distracted.
That could mean so many things - distracted from my heir duties by the Arena or distracted from the Arena by the girl? Or maybe it was none of them and the distracted hadn't be presented to me, yet.
It gave me a headache and I resolved to not think about it. Instead, I would take my frustration out on the punching bag in front of me.
Jasper orders me to reset my sequence, holding the bag tighter for tension. I know that he is tallying every hit I make to write down later.
I can feel a thin sheen of sweat spreading over my body, cooling my skin. My body feels good - nothing is tight or strained and I know I'll be using my entire allotted time this afternoon.
"Set B," Jasper demands and I immediately switch to a different pattern; three upper cuts, a knee strike and a left roundhouse before ducking and delivering a quick succession of four short-straight punches that would be meant for the torso of whomever I'm fighting. Set B is, by far, one of my favorite sets to do.
Just as I finish the second set, a low female squeak rings out from behind me, distracting Jasper enough that his grip loosens on the punching bag which makes him fail to brace himself. He is caught off guard and, with my next roundhouse, he is forcefully sent to the mat. Hard.
"Shit!" I instantly stop moving, grabbing the bag before it can swing and knock me over, too. "Fuck, Jasper. You okay?"
He nods, running a hand over his face and groaning lightly. "At least now we know your roundhouse has improved." Jasper sits up, his eyes shifting past me and widening. As his face begins to color with embarrassment, I look behind me and wish that I hadn't.
She's here, bottom lip firmly between her teeth, arms crossed over her stomach and wearing the tiniest pair of shorts I've ever seen. I drag my eyes away from the creamy length of her legs - for someone so short, they are fairly long - and look to the dark haired girl standing beside her.
The girl who has her hands clasped over her mouth and her eyes wide. The one who clearly made the squeaking noise. The daughter of Poseidon.
She's obviously here as support for the girl and I wonder if she will, eventually, become what Jasper is to me - a trainer.
"What the fuck is going on?" Andre's jovial voice cuts into the shockingly tense silence. He sounds more amused than concerned or annoyed - most likely, he'd seen the entire affair and decided the situation needed his brand of humor.
I've always wondered how Andre and James could be so different and decided it probably had something to do with their mothers, Andre's being human.
Alice jumps and turns to him, her hands flailing wildly. "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to-"
Andre's laughter cuts her off. "Jasper, stand up," he orders and then looks to me. "That kick could have been stronger. Add weights to your legs and move to the wall."
The wall was literally a wall covered in thick mats, some parts of it doubled to create blocks for kicking practices. In front of the wall was a suspended punching bag on a sliding mechanism that made force measurements easier.
Andre turns to the girl and grins. "You can get started on stretches. Then I want you to begin with three sets of twenty sit ups, pull ups and pushups. You, Screamer," he winks at Alice, "Help your friend out, yes?"
Both girls nod and begin doing as Andre directed. I take a moment to appreciate the curve of her back as she sits on the floor, legs spread in a V and leaning forward to touch her toes. She's extremely flexible-
"You shouldn't stare," Andre tells me.
"Shut the fuck up," I huff, turning away and moving to the suspended bag. Jasper hands me ten pound weights to secure to my knees and I begin sets of five roundhouse kicks, being sure to exhale the second I'm about to make impact with the bag so I can have the optimum amount of impact.
I find myself more determined than I have been in a long time.
Jasper is quiet in the locker room, his mind obviously on Alice by the expression on his face. I don't bother him because I'm no better - I want to know her name and everything about her.
Carefully, I rip the tape from the bottom of my feet because if I do it wrong, it hurts like a bitch and I'm honestly in no mood to deal with tape burns. I'm even more careful with my hands due to the aging scabs on my knuckles; they almost never healed because they opened up again every time I was at the Arena. I didn't mind.
From the front room, we can clearly hear Andre's voice boom. "Isabella! Your ride is here!" Before I can even process the thought of her leaving before I have a chance to speak to her, Andre's hand pounds on the locker room door. "You too, boys! Go home!"
The car is quiet with tense silence; Alice and Jasper subtly make eyes at each other and the girl, Isabella, keeps her face towards the window, not noticing - I hope - that my own eyes are studying her.
The gloves are her hands are intriguing, dark and tight but loose enough for her fingers to twitch and fidget. Just as a yearning to hold her hand hits me, her tiny hands close tightly and I realize that I'd already moved my hand into the air between us.
Shit.
I have to get a hold of myself. There can't be anything more special about this girl than there is about any of the girls at the Academy.
Emmett, son of Apollo, is grinning like a villain when Jasper and I step off the elevator; he wiggles is brows at us in his typical fashion.
"Ladies," he greets. Simultaneously, Jasper and I flip him off and he barks out a loud laugh. "Touchy. Anything you need to tell the great Emmett?"
"Since when did you become great?"
Emmett smiles levelly at me, a sudden glimpse of maturity coming over him. "Since Rosalie said yes."
Jasper reacts fist, thumping his fist on Emmett's shoulder. "No shit?"
"I shit you not."
I smile at my friend because he and Rosalie had been seeing each other for several years, each being the heir of their parents. Rosalie was the daughter of Aphrodite and - much to Hephaestus' dismay - the daughter of Ares. It wasn't a secret that Aphrodite was fairly unhappy about her marriage and often committed infidelity with mortals. It's a slap in the face to Hephaestus that she willingly let Ares father her child when she only grudgingly gave birth to Hephaestus' children once a century.
Because of all this, Rosalie - though incredibly beautiful - was often the subject of taunting and gossip. It had made her stronger, of course; but her walls were so high that Emmett had a tough time breaking them down.
I congratulate Emmett, wondering if Isabella has any walls that need to be deconstructed.
The next day, as school trudges along, I keep an eye out for Isabella and find it increasingly frustrating that she is no where to be found.
Obviously, our classes don't line up or she's in specialty courses because of her late arrival. I see Alice several times but Isabella is never with her.
I'm not used to not getting my way. I was spoiled and I knew it - never in my life have I had to wait for anything and I disliked having to.
Just as I am about to give up all hope of finding her, I walk out into the southern courtyard and see her sitting under a tree. A tingling sensation shoots through my body, up to my stomach and down my spine, lingering in my mind and I realize I feel nervous.
I can't bring myself to speak to her so I slowly back up to the stone wall of the school, keeping my eyes trained on her tiny body.
Isabella leans her back onto the tree, closing her eyes and flexing her hands, frowning. Her eyes open and dart down to her hands, an expression of defeat crossing her delicate features.
Slowly, she takes off her gloves, wriggling her freed fingers in the cool air. It has yet to snow at the Academy but it's fairly cold, the grass beneath my feet frosted over, the air before my face foggy when I breathe out.
Isabella places her hands on the grass beside her.
And then I am seeing the singularly most astonishing sight I've ever seen. The grass under and around her hands instantly fades into a sickly, pale brown and steadily, the color seeps out of the surrounding grass in equal circles. The already dead grass continues to lose color and life and begins to turn black, the soil underneath it becoming dry and cracked.
Isabella's eyes are closed again, her cheeks flushing light pink as her fingers dig into the cracked ground, drawing more life from it.
Unexpectedly, her eyes snap open; even from a distance, I can tell that they're glowing bright silver, her pupil nearly non-existent. Isabella rips her hands from the ground beside her and covers her face, curling her knees up to her chest and sobbing out.
A perfect circle 3 yards in diameter surrounds her, dead and cracked ground and the large tree she was sitting under half-dead.
This was the power the Gods were so afraid of.
Parts of me are warring with themselves - should I approach her or do I run away?
Needing time to process, I hazard one glance back in her direction as I back away, shocked to find her teary, still glowing silver eyes trained on me.
A/N: i'd like to thank LittleMissDreamer7 for being the first person to reply to my reply of your review! LittleMiss - you pushed me to finish the chapter without even trying!
also, i know it was really a rather short chapter - but i've made no promises to make long chapters. i've only written a fifteen page chapter once in my life and it took way too long; i'm not a patient person. chapters should be somewhere around the length of chapter 3, but there wasn't much more that Edward had to say.
i write the chapters as they come to me. if its short, its short.
be brutally honest. i can take it.
~cupcakeriot